There are several names applied to the language, just as there are to the Fula people. They call their language Pulaar or Pular in the western dialects and Fulfulde in the central and eastern dialects. Fula(h) and Fulani in English come originally from Manding (esp. Mandinka, but also Malinke and Bamana) and Hausa, respectively; Peul in French, also occasionally found in literature in English, comes from Wolof.

Fula is based on verbo-nominal roots, from which verbal, noun and modifier words are derived. It uses suffixes (sometimes inaccurately called infixes, as they come between the root and the inflectional ending) to modify meaning. These suffixes often serve the same purposes in Fula that prepositions do in English.

Fula languages are characterized by a robust noun class system, with 25 noun classes being common across most of the Fula dialects (Arnett 1975: 5). Noun classes in Fula are abstract categories with some classes having semantic attributes that characterize a subset of that class’ members, and others being marked by a membership too diverse to warrant any semantic categorization of the class’ members (Paradis 1992: 25). For example, there are classes for stringy long things, and another for big things, another for liquids, a noun class for strong rigid objects, another for human or humanoid traits etc. Gender does not have any role in the Fula noun class system and the marking of gender is done with adjectives rather than class markers (Arnett 1975: 74). Noun classes are marked by suffixes on nouns. These suffixes are the same as the class name though they are frequently subject to phonological processes, most frequently the dropping of the suffix’s initial consonant (McIntosh 1984:45-46).

The table below illustrates the class name, the semantic property associated with class membership, and an example of a noun with its class marker. Classes 1 and 2 can be described as personal classes, classes 3-6 as diminutive classes, classes 7-8 as augmentative classes, and classes 9-25 as neutral classes. It is formed on the basis of McIntosh’s 1984 description of Kaceccereere Fulfulde, which the author describes as “essentially the same” as Arnott’s 1970 description of the noun classes of the Gombe dialect of Fula. Thus, certain examples from Arnott also informed this table (Arnett 1975: 5), (McIntosh 1984:44).

The pronoun that corresponds to a given noun is determined by the noun class. Because men and women belong to the same noun class, the English pronouns "he" and "she" are translated into Fula by the same pronoun. However, depending on the dialect, there are some 25 different noun classes, each with its own pronoun. Sometimes those pronouns have both a nominative case (i.e., used as verb subject) and an accusative or dative case (i.e., used as a verb object).

While there are numerous varieties of Fula, it is typically regarded as a single language. Wilson (1989) states that "travellers over wide distances never find communication impossible," and Ka (1991) concludes that despite its geographic span and dialect variation, Fulfulde is still fundamentally one language.[4] However, Ethnologue has found that nine different translations are needed to make the Bible comprehensible for all Fula speakers, and it treats these varieties as separate languages. They are listed in the box at the beginning of this article.

Fulani is an official language in Senegal (Pulaar) and Nigeria (Fulfulde), an official regional language in Guinea (Pular), where many speakers are monolingual, and a national language of Mali (Maasina) and Niger (Fulfulde).

When written using the Latin script, Fula uses the following additional special "hooked" characters to distinguish meaningfully different sounds in the language: Ɓ/ɓ[ɓ], Ɗ/ɗ[ɗ ], Ŋ/ŋ[ŋ], Ñ/ñ[ ɲ], Ƴ/ƴ[ʔʲ]. The apostrophe (ʼ) is used as a glottal stop. In Nigeria ʼy substitutes ƴ, and in Senegal ñ is used instead of ɲ.[clarification needed]

During the late 1980s an alphabetic script was devised by the brothers Ibrahima Barry and Abdoulaye Barry, in order to represent the Fulani language. After several years of development it started to be adopted among some Fulani communities, and is currently taught in Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia and other nearby countries. The name Adlam is an anagram of the first four letters of the alphabet (A, D, L, M), standing for Alkule Danndayɗe Lenyol am Mul`de ("the alphabet which protects My tribe from vanishing"). The Adlam script has been proposed for encoding in Unicode.[5]